If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Robotic dinosaurs and humanoid lobby staff helped guests check in to a hotel run by androids, at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Wednesday. The 72-room hotel, set to open in full on July 17, is staffed by 10 robots and 10 humans. Its name, "Henn na," means 'strange hotel.'

A Japanese businessman has come up with what he thinks the hotel of the future will look like. He's replaced staff with robots, and added facial recognition to your hotel room door. It's not the stuff of fantasy, the future is here now.

If there’s one place on Earth you can already get a glimpse of our robot-assisted future, it’s Japan. Routinely at the forefront of robotics research, the country has brought us some of the weirdest automatons, most lifelike androids, and cutest helper-bots.

Nowhere is this more evident than at Nagasaki’s Henn-na Hotel, a hotel run by robots that opened this year. Walk into reception and a mechanised dinosaur will guide you through check-in; go to your room and a luggage bot will wheel your suitcase along beside you; get ready for bed and your own robot companion will turn out the lights.

Henn-na Hotel CEO Hideo Sawada sells his offering as part of a utopian vision where robots take over manual labour so humans can turn their attention to more creative pursuits. Replacing staff with robots might reduce labour costs, but their appeal to visitors needs to last beyond novelty value.

Motherboard host Ben Ferguson checks into the robot hotel in the first episode of our new travel series Voyager, made possible by Kayak. The robot workers he meets are courteous and communicative, but can they emulate the human warmth of their flesh-and-blood counterparts? Could robots really be our future holiday companions, or do man and machine ultimately get lost in translation?